Weekly Roundup: AI as Good as Therapists, Breathing to Lower Anxiety, Stress and Memory Formation, and New Cells Discovered for Object Recognition

This week is another week when there seems so much to write about that someone who is so indecisiveness as I am had problems deciding what to write.

But as AI is still hot on everyone’s lips and seemingly advancing in leaps and bounds, let’s start with how AI seems to beat therapists…in some measures that is. Then we can look at anxiety as we live in anxious times and how this impacts memory formation and how brain circuits control breathing and anxiety - also scientists have discovered new brain cells to trigger learning. Let’s go:

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A Turing Test for Heat and Mind

So can AI, specifically ChatGPT be as good as a therapist. I would instinctively say “no way”. According to this research by Hatch et al., just published, it appears I am wrong.

You may also be surprised - but let me calm you down a bit (especially if you are a therapist). This research was not set in therapy situations, this would normally require a specially trained AI (of which I am sure there are many already existing or in development), but by asking ChatGPT to respond to therapy questions and having people (800 in total) rate these responses in comparison to those by therapists themselves.

And it is here that AI seems to perform better specifically:

• ChatGPT’s responses were rated higher on psychotherapy principles

• Participants struggled to differentiate AI from human-written responses

This was based on 8 different scenarios for couples. The absolute difference in ratings was not large, but that AI has reached this level is impressive. An analysis of the responses showed that ChatGPT used more words and this could be contributing to people rating it as better.

This is a long way from replacing therapists but shows that AI could meaningfully contribute to therapeutic scenarios or could be a first step.

However, we also know that a lot of the benefits of therapy also comes from the direct interactions with a human being, not to mention responding in the moment to emotional signals - AI is nowhere near that…yet.

From therapy to managing your own emotions, or anxiety, through breathing.

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Slow Down and Take a Deep Breath

We all know the classic advice of taking a deep breath. This is probably not great advice but we do know that breathing does influence brain wave patterns - the better advice is to breath slowly.

The question Jhang et al. of the Salk Institute wanted to find out is how this is controlled by the brain. You may think this is a simple example of brain control i.e. use the prefrontal regions, our executive centres, to activate breathing centres lower down in the brain to control breathing. Not so.